businessLinks To Help Each Other Grow

There's a few ways to do link exchanges with fellow bloggers that are OK, and there's a few ways that are NOT OK.

OK

Write an article on your site and mention a friends blog that is similar. If you're writing about dogs, and your friend has a blog about animals/dogs, then mentioning them inside your text is OK because it's relevant. If you were writing about dogs and mentioned a site about airplanes - well that doesn't make much sense, does it? If a topic comes up and you know a friend has a blog about something, and you want to include it in your blog post, then do it. It's relevant, it's pretty natural, and it fits in with the topic you're writing about. It won't look or feel like spam. Just make sure the site you link to is a quality site. Don't like to a piece of junk site with tons of ads, popups, or other annoying junk. If you don't like the site, then don't link to it. If you send them 100 clicks and they send you 150 - that's fine. It's not a huge difference. However, if you send them 500 clicks and they send you 100, then they should plug you more often. Maybe you would plug them in your articles once or twice per week and they would plug you four times to make up for the difference. If your site is a lot larger, then you'd want to plug them a bit less than they plug you. It may be challenging to keep up with the numbers, but do your best on both sides to keep things as fair as possible. If you're both around the same size, then don't even count the clicks. Just blog about each other whenever you feel like it or whenever you agree to it.

You COULD link to people in your sidebar, but do you really want a site full of sidebar links? Did you ever see a website that had like 200 links and half of those links were either not relevant or no longer active? If you do this, then you don't keep track of how many clicks that you send each other. This is not for click counting, but rather building back links.

Banner ads? You COULD trade banner ads if you really wanted to. These could be small 125x125 or 88x31 ads, although the 88x31 ads are really outdated and most websites have much bigger images now. I think if you do this, then you should make sure that your site and their site send a fair amount of clicks to each other. For example, it would be fair if you both sent each other around 100 clicks per day. It would NOT be fair if you sent them 500 clicks and they sent you 100. Traffic trades like this should be fair.

Not OK

Don't bother linking to, or getting links from, sites that aren't about the same topic. It's good to get backlinks from other sites, but you really want to stay relevant and ON topic. Does it make sense for a blog about airplanes to link to a blog about snakes? Not really, and chances are that a person reading about planes from 1952 isn't interested in ball pythons. You don't want to look like a linkfarm with 100 links in your blog sidebar. That's just irresponsible and provides a bad read for your users.

Don't let people guest post unless they're a regular weekly contributor. At that point, they're not called guests - they're part of your site. Matt Cutt's made it quite clear that guest posts are not worth it and he's right about that. People come to your blog to read something that YOU wrote that has YOUR personality. If you want to mention a friends blog, then go for it - that's fine. But don't fill your blog with posts from random people because your site will lack a strong voice.

Don't run a blog that has no point and is only filled with blog posts full of other people's links. You'll just become the spam trash can and no one wants to read that.

There's an example of how I linked to something in this article. If I was writing about starting a blog, then I would link to that article, just like I did. I found the word/s that are similar to what I'm linking to and I linked them to it. That's all!

Linking to each other is easy - just keep it relevant and DON'T overdo it!

New Member

I have done back links in friends blogs to mine but only if we was talking about or related topics, also I had asked before hand you don’t want to make other blogs mad they can hurt you, by telling people your not a a good team player. I thought your information was well given.